Public US hearing on UFOs [video]
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1. Cynicism: "they're doing it for personal gain, it's all a lie."
2. Ridicule: "this is stupid, shut up."
3. Others I'm sure I'm missing.
Regardless, almost no one here is willing to treat this subject with good faith, only to discourage curiosity and encourage dismissive ridicule.
Hume's argument against miracles is based on : 1) The uniformity of nature (the laws of nature are regular and unchanging) 2) The probability of testimony; based on the number and character of witnesses, and circumstances in which the miracle was witnessed. 3)A miracle is defined by Hume to be a violation of a law of nature. Not just very low likelihood events. (Though not explicitly a violation of the laws of nature themselves, Aliens visiting Earth would require violating the laws of nature as we currently understand them)
So, Hume argues, the probability of a miracle occurring is very low and the probability of a false report of a miracle occurring is much higher. Therefore, it is more likely that a report of a miracle is false than that it is true in nearly all circumstances.
I think this argument pretty much holds for Aliens and UFOs too.
Part of treating a matter in good faith is understanding when your position is at the very least highly unlikely, or purely speculative. It is not a code word that means other people must treat you as having a good argument, more like they must treat you seriously - and some arguments presented in seriousness are not worth much more than a brusque dismissal.
> There are long tails in the distribution of the universe.
This is exactly the issue. There are no such “tails” on 0 data. Empiricism is a powerful tool, but it’s not universal.
Yes. The same as -not everyone but many- here will treat magic, homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropody, Christian science (!), voodoo, astrology, tarot readings, palmistry, and other quackery. Being scientifically curious doesn't mean believeing any old bullshit anyone tries to sell you.
With powerful enough computers and telescopes, scanning other planets for life or intelligent life will become far easier and more successful, and as a species which has only worked on space travel for some 60 years who is to say that one which has worked on it for 100s of years would not be able to travel large distances to explore their indicated "intelligent life" planets.
What confuses some people, and me, however, is the why. But I think we might be overplaying the significance of visitation on their end. We don't consider it significant when we drive from LA to NY as we've been able to for a long time. If you took a caveman during neolithic times across the world in a Ferrari he would probably experience extreme ontological shock. If I had the capacity for interplanetary travel I would definitely use it for my own personal entertainment and curiosity.
Calling this "any old bullshit" and putting it on the same level as magic only further stigmatises the issue, and prevents thorough investigation into the issue and delays increased transparency. Which is the only way to cure speculation, true or untrue
How would you suggest one approach this kind of hearing to be considered doing so in good faith?
HackerNews can be skeptical in interesting, informative ways - the discussion from yesterday of how the superconductor video could have been faked or could be representing something other than a superconductor is a great example. The UFO discussions are usually not that.
Thousands and thousands of people have experienced extraordinary things over decades and multiple continents. All people here are willing to consider is that there is financial gain to be had, etc. Not that they are actually being truthful, and seeking nothing more than understanding.
Plus come ON. There's a chance that we possess something that can negate the Higgs field. That's huge beyond words.
And there are very reasonable reasons for why they think they experienced that. Just go back a hundred years and read what many people believed in back then. Most of which are trivially false (from our perspective).
Heck, religion is still a thing today. More religions than can fit together so if nothing else we know most of them are wrong.
There's a lot more to it than that. People hallucinate and confabulate. People see patterns where there are none all the time. People unintentionally modify their own memories in all sorts of ways whenever they recall them. People believe things with no evidence just because they want to. People embellish their stories to fit the conclusion they want.
If it all exists, I am pretty sure all this technology has considerable value for the military and as such, there will be immense resistance to acknowledge anything.
There's a lot of "somethings" that could be the case without it having anything to do with actual aliens existing. The two broad categories would be that it's an intentional cover story for something meant to be secret, either legitimate research or some kind of corruption -- or it's sincere crackpot research in the government, of which there are plenty of examples, from paranormal research to ordinary pseudoscience.
I truly believe that all UFO sightings have been terrestrial technology tests or atmospheric events. If a flying saucer had been found that was capable of interstellar travel we wouldn't have dinky two person ones sitting in a museum. They'd be the basis of mining tech that would empower the finding nation.
This is basically the only available truth (if you add in people hallucinating/misremembering/etc). The problem is you can never “prove” this to someone who wants to believe otherwise.
Let’s say the government legitimately did lay bare all of its UFO related classified documents and it explained some portion of events with known military secrets. There would still be a huge contingent claiming they were holding back something. And you could never prove them wrong. There is always a deeper secret to a conspiracy theorist.
Ask yourself: why and how does only an extremely limited number of people in the US government consistently have access to what feels like a steady stream of alien crafts going back to the 1930s? Why has no one else recovered these? Why doesn’t congress know? Why didn’t Trump know (picking on him because we all know he’s not great with keeping secrets)? Why would aliens go out of their way to stay hidden? Why would they travel hundreds of light years (or more) to earth, only to immediately, and consistently, crash at a speed that leaves largely recoverable parts? I recommend researching what the aftermath of plane intercepting the ground at a comparably paltry 500mph looks like for reference.
Compare this to the alternative explanations, all of which are completely plausible. Nothing about it being aliens makes any goddamn sense. The only thing that makes sense is it’s bipartisan, because no politician in their right mind would be against this, if only because that would make you look suspicious/untrustworthy.
With our current level of technology we have not lost a major airframe in the US since 2001. Yet these beings advanced enough to fly across interstellar space get to earth and suddenly can't keep their ships in the air?
I also encourage those who are very skeptical to think about how we as human would likely try to explore other star systems, in fact we already have started such projects. Our first step is to send a craft that with subliminal speed takes 100s of years, but even us we think about sending a craft with smaller probes inside it.
My point is those probes inside the transport craft, we would likely have a pretty high loss tolerance, so is it really that surprising they might crash sometimes?
Look, I'm beyond skeptical of the claims, but it's not because the spacecraft shouldn't crash. The most likely time to lose an airframe is on takeoff or landing, not in between, so why wouldn't the aliens have problems once they reach their destination?
Because they've consistently failed at providing proof, every single one of them. I guess aliens have galactic-level OpSec, defeating every whistleblower so far.
The town square remains empty!
[1] https://www.dxomark.com/samsung-galaxy-s23-ultra-camera-test... scroll to "tele" section.
But devils advocate, most smartphone cameras have ultra wide lenses and even those with decent zoom perform really poorly, due to shaking, upscaling and awful autofocus. Remember the “super zoom” smartphone that was marketed to take good photos of the moon, but they just faked (overlaid) the details because the native quality was so crap? And the moon isn’t even that small for the human eye. In fact, there are tons of shitty “ufo” recordings that are useless simply because the quality is so shit.
In either case, there is tons of multi-modal sensor data from the Air Force/navy sightings so that’s certainly worth looking into before random people’s smartphones.
That lends a lot of weight to the "not credible" side of the argument.
Sometimes satellites have very strange motion relative to your position, similar to planets going retrograde. They can make "J" shapes that look very odd. The first time I noticed this, my friend and I followed it all the way to the penumbra and umbra of the Earth's shadow - it suddenly dimmed as it entered the penumbra, and then completely disappeared as it passed into the umbra. A sure sign of a satellite in orbit.
If you want to spot satellites, the best way I've found is to pick three random stars and imagine them as a triangle. Watch to see if the triangle changes shape - that means one of them is moving. It's very easy to get confused if you're looking at just one star, eg, sometimes the clouds are moving but you mistake the clouds as stationary and see the star as moving. But if you pick 3, even if you have that illusion, you'll see that they don't move relative to each other.
On two occasions - once in Berkeley, CA and once in Athens, Greece - I saw a red light moving through the sky, and I followed it as far as I could but I didn't see it enter the penumbra (which isn't to say it did or didn't, just that I lost sight of it). I just have no idea what that was, or if it was the same on both occasions.
One time my friends and I saw a flashing white light in the sky. It would rapidly increase from 0 to full brightness, and then just as quickly disappear. It stayed in roughly the same place. My friend had a good hypothesis, which was that it was a helicopter with some kind of rotating light.
I think my favorite is that once, I saw an airplane contrail collapse into a series of smoke rings. Contrails often form these clumps of cloud, sort of like rain drops. These ones must have been very circular, because each one became a giant ring.
You can see the clumps I'm talking about here: https://images.all-free-download.com/images/graphiclarge/con...
There's pictures of rings on image search, but it looks like they came from the plane's engine, not from the mechanism I describe.
https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2011/08/crow-instability-in-contr...
https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2015/05/hybrid-contrails-with-cro...
I think it's a different mechanism, I think it's more like when you squeeze a drop of food coloring into water. I think it's something along the lines of, the friction on the outside of the drop and the momentum of the fluid on the inside of the drop impose a force in opposite directions, causing the fluid to spin, resulting in a vortex; because the cross section is a near perfect circle, this rotation is balanced, and you get a toroidal vortex. I imagine that, the bigger your drop, the more error you can tolerate in your circle. So by the time you get to the scale of, say, a caldera[1], there's a lot of room for error. (That's a slightly different mechanism, but I think comparable in this way.)
The photos don't look like what I saw. They weren't oriented like that (they were hanging down like the clumps, perpendicular to the planes direction of motion), and they weren't so well formed. They were more lumpy.
But this was a couple years ago and I didn't take a picture, so I can only go off of my recollection, and my strictly intuitive understanding of the fluid dynamics from the thousands of rings I used to blow smoking Black & Mild in my mispent youth. (You can also see rare and interesting rings that way, but I wouldn't recommend it!)
Very cool stuff that I'm pumped to know about and will look out for though. Thanks!
[1] https://66.media.tumblr.com/e0dd679a1c62751f09e702d8c005b9a1...
If I find myself outside at night, I try to spend at least a couple minutes looking for them (or whatever else there is to see, shooting stars, interesting clouds, Zodiacal lights, ...). You'd be surprised how much you can see if you spend a couple minutes regularly over a long period of time, especially relative to the minimal effort involved. (That being the thesis of the blog post.)
I suspect the "U" in "UFO" in still going to strongly mean "Unknown" at the end of the hearing.
The best case scenario is that he hints at which governement agency's official should be ask to testify next - a game that can be played until we reach the "it's classified, wait a few decade" part of the game.
[Edit]: Apparently, (from the live feed of the hearing by the Guardian) he "knows “the exact locations” of where the extra terrestrial material is, "Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses".
And yet, I'm ready to bet the obvious follow-up questions "ok, then, where are the locations ?", and "who are those 40 witnesses ?" will remain conveniently unanswered.
But - what I heard during this hearing was a commitment to set up a reporting system - outside Pentagon influence - to start aggregating these reports and analyzing them.
That's progress I guess.
It was closed because not a single credible sighting was made and was considered a waste of money by the MoD:
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22991014
So this has already happened in another country and nothing was found.
So less progress and more a waste of your tax payer money.
But, in the general spirit, transparency and oversight from non military part of the executive branch can't be a completely bad thing !
For info, there is something that might look like such a DB in France: https://www.cnes-geipan.fr/fr/recherche/cas . Apart from confirming that most sightings have a perfercly mondane cause, I don't know if it brings much info.
:shrug:, I guess ?
It's also progress that this subject is being treated with the seriousness it so richly deserves.
There is one witness who is claiming under oath, and many others privately to Congressmembers, that we are in possession of craft not built by humans. To my knowledge this directly contradicts to what AARO is publicly claiming.
The X-Files and Ancient Aliens have a lot to answer for.
> ...we are in possession of craft not built by humans.
Aren't KUKA robots awesome?! More seriously - are the aliens only visiting US territories, or is the "cover-up" a global effort that includes coordination between rival nations.
The trouble of course, is that moonbats and other whackjobs can't possibly accept that.
If you told me that they'd secretly intercepted an alien transmission (if any of you guys are radio astronomers and it's impossible for such a transmission to be kept secret, let me know) that might at least be plausible. Flying saucers and other nonsense is stuff for children. Grow up.
We've had 20 years of cell phone cameras at this point... where are your pictures? Where are the leaks? They couldn't keep Snowden from blowing shit up about illegal universal surveillance, but they can keep a lid on anti-gravity devices recovered from spaceship wreckage?
Try getting into bird photography using your cellphone. You will find that your photos of birds mere hundreds of feet away suck.
(I spent half a G on a smart telescope and even those pictures are not that great)
It is not as easy as you would think.
Check and mate!
I think that's the intended result. This is a distraction.
Won't do anything about endless toxins being put into water and air by industry, climate change passing the turning point, will spend millions for hearings on UFOs which wouldn't make an ounce of difference even if real (they aren't, FTL aliens don't give a damn about earth, we're ants and at best they'd send automated drones)
I do admit I would love to see religion destroy itself trying to explain aliens but I'm sure they have a "creations going on elsewhere" in their backpocket just in case. Or they'd just deny it like flatearthers as long as they can get away with it.
It's increasingly clear that "disclosure" is either yet another sensationalist ruse to keep the public distracted from substantive issues that could interrupt the flow of power and money, so deeply disruptive to the global order or cultural id that the military-industrial complex won't allow it to be disclosed, actually do have supra-governmental one-world government roots that put it outside of the reach of any political inquiry beyond funding, or hide critical advanced weapons platforms and would disrupt seemingly colossal efforts of cloak and dagger efforts and potentially destroy critical advantage.
I for one do hope we have communication lasers, anti-gravity ships, and that Jesus himself is piloting a mothership back to save the planet and raise the frequency because... goddamn it... space lasers.
But until the main funding comes under threat, I don't think anything with meaningful utility will be released. I have enjoyed the hell out of the crazy shit popping up on Youtube however. Good Lord, that navy seal podcast about the ship in the jungle that came out last week was a great story.
The problem is classification, and its abuse. And, in government, nobody is really accountable, especially in over-securing data.
It can’t be they believe aliens are flying around acting like a laser pointer to a cat. Do they think adversaries have extraordinary technologies?
I can’t figure it out.
Personally I'm always more interested in the conspiracy behind the conspiracy. It is undeniably more likely that the Pentagon has, for some reason, started quietly pushing out things in this vein than it is that actual aliens are flying around. I'm very curious as to what their motivation might be.
There's a lot of evidence, for instance, that during the heyday of Area 51 they knew they had to get out in front of civilian sightings of odd aircraft, and that project bluebook was essentially them just cross referencing sightings with classified test flights. So I'm curious about what they might be trying to get ahead of here.
This UFO/UAP stuff reminds me of that.
And also said there were individuals whom were injured in the reverse engineering of said non-human spacecraft.
This is all TS/SCI, so the actual hard details and proof are locked in a fucking SCIF.
- Third hand claims, “I was told by a credible source…”
- low quality imagery whose validity is disputed (gimbal video, etc.)
The latter brother saw something late at night on the deck of an aircraft carrier. He told me about it shortly after, but a couple years later (the next time I asked about it), he was suddenly evasive and noncommittal. It was the classic "lights in the sky, making right angle turns at high speeds". The other brother saw a huge perfectly silent blue orb slowly drifting over a cornfield.
What's clear is for some reason - possibly good reasons - the Pentagon is stonewalling on any kind of response as to what's going on.
The laws of physics tell us that if is highly improbable for intergalactic intelligence to be able to visit us. Else we need a plausible explanation.
I will assume a reply of “that does not guarantee truth/the system is imperfect” has already been given. Of course it doesn’t, and of course it isn’t. There are few guarantees. Passing those filters makes it more likely to be true.
More likely. Not certain. More.
I don't want to support stigma, but I also don't want more baseless stuff added to my life (which it is because my family tends to want me to help process the information whenever someone seeks attention, be it the person disclosing information or journalists covering it or internet commentators.)
As far as I know, it's to destigmatize the idea of UFO/UAP sightings, and encourage both civilian and military pilots to report them.
So that they can investigated - to identify aerial surveillance platforms, like the infamous Chinese spy balloon, and experimental aircraft.
Ancient aliens plays on loop on history channel 24/7 on top of a plethora of alien moves being made every year. As well it's the one superstition that all people sort of believe as well. Far right (that isn't hard religious) is deep into these conspiracies. Far left that does shrooms all-day while fondling crystals and playing with tarro cards like Pokemon also like UFOs as well. Even general center left atheist and scientists at least likes the idea of life on a distant plant even if we aren't in possession of an alliance craft.
In school and the work place talking about religion can cause problems with HR/administration or even a lawsuit but you can't get in trouble for talking about aliens.
Even the popular avatar movies tries to mix aliens and religion into an easy native for people even if it's about a human invasion. So much so that people suffer "post avatar depression"
https://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/11/avatar.movie.b...
Aliens in a since is the new "god of the gaps" to help people make since of things we don't fully understand.
(Sorry, I could not resist.)
*
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ 1% \
/_________\
/ \
/ 19% \
/ \
/_________________\
/ \
/ 80% \- 1% really saw something interesting/rare.
- 19% think they saw something interesting that is easily explained.
- 80% liars.
Fogbeam Labs - Chapel Hill NC. Alien AGI Researcher needed. Must have experience with interfacing quantum neural temporal fields with hydro-coptic marzelvane environments. 9,743,212 years of experience minimum. May work remote IF located beyond the Oort Cloud. Compensation: depends on experience. Bonus paid in genuine Earth cattle.
- the smartphone era produced fewer pictures of UFOs despite everyone having a camera
- crop circles kind of died out
- in order for information to be suppressed, there had to be a conspiracy that was simultaneously worldwide and watertight, yet itself did not leak like, say, Cold War spies
- a whole plethora of new unevidenced beliefs would sweep across the world
So: Occam's razor tells us that there almost certainly aren't any UFOs.
What, then do we do with the eyewitness accounts?
It also becomes apparent just how unreliable these are. People can become thoroughly convinced that things happened which did not and could not have happened. People acquire all sorts of strange beliefs, sometimes to their detriment. Cults come and wait for landings that never happen, but also serious men in serious jobs have one report in their lives that directly contradicts reality.
It can be a little difficult to deal with how unsatisfactorily the sausage of consensus reality is made, but it's the only alternative to wandering back into Carl Sagan's "demon-haunted world".
Not only eyewitness accounts, but also recorded military footage (e.g. onboard cameras, FLIR sensors mentioned in the hearing). Are you suggesting that numerous high-ranking former military officials are lying under oath? And that the expensive, high-tech equipment recording the objects also failed in a way that showed something that wasn't actually there? That sounds much more frightening to me than the alternative explanation.
Yes. And those that aren't lying are severely mistaken. Expensive high tech equipment can fail or show weird readings ALL THE TIME. You get small piece of debris on a camera moving at mach 1 and it's going to look like something is moving at mach 1 with you, and somehow magically keeping up in strange ways before "zooming off" when it falls off the camera.
Pilots are NOT techs. Their jobs is to fly the plane and shoot shit down. They need a working understanding of the tools in front of them and do their best with the information presented. If my car says that my engine oil pressure is at 0, but somehow the car is still running, I don't assume magic. I assume ignorance and take it to a mechanic. MANY of these supposed UFO sightings boil down to such situations, and techs have verified that multiple times, but that gets ignored.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the testimonies provided under oath today do not match your description of a piece of debris on a camera/sensor. If you have not already watched the hearing I would recommend it.
> MANY of these supposed UFO sightings boil down to such situations, and techs have verified that multiple times, but that gets ignored.
Source(s)? I would love to read more about techs who have talked about these events.
Yes? It's not like that hasn't happened before, and there's no real way to contradict them. And if they did they wouldn't be prosecuted. And if they were prosecuted they would be pardoned.
We can't see the footage, so that's not admissible as evidence in the court of public opinion.
What I consider impossible though is for what is alleged staying secret for this long. Especially internationally.
It rose on the horizon over the mountains, way off in the distance.
Then within about 2 seconds it was hovering directly above us about 100 feet up.
It was huge, silent.
I was marching in my Civil Air Patrol group. Our commander was a former SR-71 mechanic when it was still a top secret program.
He was doing the marchine exercise and when we saw the craft we all watched it - then when it basically teleported directly above us - he very quickly ushered us back into our group hangar.
I've seen others - but this was the closest I have been to one.
It has shaped my reality ever since (I was 14 when it happened, and I am 48 now)
The TR3B wasnt a known class of things back then - but the "triangle with lights at each point" was a typical design trope talked about.
This thing was huge, a triangle, was literally hovering above us. and I could see the details on the bottom.
It wasnt until years later that tr3b came out as the name for the thing.
UFO stands for "Unidentified Flying Object" and doesn't necessarily mean anything extraterrestrial.
Given that, I think a strong measure of skepticism in this regard is fairly well supported. But, a good scientist should always be willing to change their position if the evidence dictates such, and new evidence can always come along. See: The Problem of Induction.
Statistics makes the claim that aliens are more likely to exist than not.
"There exists alien somewhere in the universe" doesn't imply "there are aliens visiting us right now", though.
Its not like I was expecting them to reveal aliens, but the whole thing was just a long winded way of saying "we don't know yet lol"
The more interesting one is seeing the signs that there is growing momentum in the government to gain more clearance and potentially make more classified information public. So perhaps this is the amuse-bouche?
There was so much "non-revealance" announced.
Every question that must be closed/scif based confirms the darkest thoughts.
We have been in contact with them from the 1930s in the current extant of global governments....
They interfere with sensors, weapons arming and are concerned about nukes.
There have been "very disturbing" incidents with malevolent entities.
Wait till we get to the biologics part...
They DIDNT ask if DNA was recovered or other medical/tissue samples... that should be the fundamental question ; what does their DNA look like, if we had recovored "biologics" and then what was done with that information? Were hybrids being made from them?
They also never ask about breakaway civs.
- aliens exist - they have recovered technology - they have recovered bodies - there's a shadow government of people approving access to information on a higher level than the government - money is being directly taken out of other projects and/or services to fund UAP projects - there is an active disinformation program in the government directly regarding UAPs - people have been criminally abused by government contractors over this - there's massive mismanagement with government military contractors
Etc etc. If you're a UFO nerd you've heard it all before, but this is pretty big stuff to have on record, and that's the main thing. A lot of that needs to be followed up legally, and it sounds like a lot more is going to be discussed behind closed doors.
The part that never adds up to me is the complete lack of concrete evidence in the open (when there is ubiquitous technology for detection in the hands of the public), or the implied astonishing competence of governments and agencies cooperating internationally to keep alien intelligence hidden. We couldn't prevent a pandemic, have lost nuclear weapons and are watching the planet die due to carbon emissions… yet somehow the alien-intelligence-suppression-network works?
Unfortunately all of that is still classified but congresspeople who have been briefed have been sufficiently motivated to introduce legislation to investigate further (as Chuck Schumer has recently done in the Senate).
wait... someone testified _under oath_ that these things exist? Either they're lying/exaggerating, or they just announced the single largest discovery in the history of the human race? I feel stupid just typing this...
Or mistaken, or they're accurately reporting what someone else told them, who was lying/exaggerating/mistaken.
Our first encounter with extraterrestrial life will probably be microbes, exciting but not exactly little green men from X-Files.
Grusch states they have "biologics" that are "non-human" based on people he talked to
So it's a complete nothing burger.
(Please don't say Armageddon!)
I do support continuing the Congressional investigation. Even if there are no aliens, they might find evidence of misuse of government funds or violations of oversight rules. Let's get clear on how our tax dollars are being spent. Members of the Defense and Intelligence committees are cleared at the highest levels so there's no legal reason to conceal the existence of any programs from them.
I understand the skepticism but really think most of you don't understand that there's a lot going on in this hearing.
My assumption is that they recovered apes placed into advanced test drones. After all, apes were put into early test spacecraft in the 1950s and 1960s. But today animal rights is a bigger concern, and the use of animal test subjects could cause controversy, so they want to keep that quiet. Hence the person testifying would disclose that only in a SCIF.
OK.
> - there is an active disinformation program in the government directly regarding UAPs
Would that active disinformation program include having people go testify to Congress, in front of cameras, and tell them what's in my first quoted section?
More generally, any time someone says "there is a disinformation campaign saying X", there is a greater than zero chance that, yes, there is a disinformation campaign, and that person making that claim is (knowingly or not) part of that campaign.
The one new thing is that David Grusch committed to immediately naming specific people, agencies, and locations where craft are supposedly stored to Congress.
Let's talk about congressmen insider trading instead.
far, far more likely UFOs/UAPs are an elaborate psyop than an advanced civilization that has figured out how to make it here but not figured out how not to crash.
Which is tech that would allow complete saturation/exploration of the entire galaxy on the order of millions of years. As essentially by the time one probe is able to reach one side of the galaxy from the host system the entire galaxy will have already been filled with probe copies.
It wouldn't be particularly difficult for a more advanced civ with potentially millions or billions of years evolutionary lead time on ourselves to have explored the galaxy and by extension have probes in our solar system.
These claims in the hearing are definitely extraordinary, but the tech required to "make it here" doesn't particularly need to be.
As an analogy using our own known technology and scientific understanding. We probably could already construct a probe that eventually could reach the Centauri star system near us. And we could have this probe designed in a way that it contains a 3d printer and once it locates the raw material needed for this 3d printer, then it can print a new copy of itself.
Now extend this slightly in that the probe has a 2 way link, perhaps very slow, light years obviously in distance, but can eventually send and receive information from earth.
Then based on the sensor data collected in Centauri, we can certainly imagine that we can send updated schematics for new designs to print.
Yes this all took 100s of years. But a future technological civilization modeled on us, is likely headed that way.
Lastly, perhaps biology once better mastered, can be manipulated a bit like 3d printing. This could potentially explain reports of humanoid entities. The advanced probes are printing what they observe.
Obviously all this is hypothetical speculation but the point is even biological evidence doesn’t necessarily mean actual original beings that traveled many light years here.
Another point I like to make is that the craft we observe, assuming we do, definitely do not need to be the actual interstellar craft, why would they be. We wouldn’t do it like that, why would they. Instead they could be local probes dispatched from another craft, or even local probes manufactured by the master probe.
Lastly, let’s assume we see mach 50 speeds on the craft, that’s still not a significant fraction of the speed of light.
This is the same "club" that consistently failed so badly that an "outsider" (with a then Twitter problem) was a viable alternative.
Yes, I'm curious about the UFO "problem", but it doesn't crack the Top 100, or even Top 1000 of things Congress should be focused on.